XDG User Directories

Many Linux distributions such as Ubuntu or Linux Mint set up your default user directories such as your downloads directory, music directory, documents directory, and so on. This also gives these directories special identifying icons. These directories may be used by gnome-shell extensions, such as area screenshot. To set XDG user directories up, run this command:
Template:Cli

The default user directory settings are stored in Template:Filename. You can edit it to change the default settings for where you want users to have their directories with this:

Tip: You do not have to edit this file if you only want to set up XDG User Directories for one user or you accept the default settings.

This command creates the directories needed and sets them up so GNOME knows that is where those types of files should go by default. The folders also have special icons depending on what folder your configuration file tells GNOME they are.

To edit your user directories configuration file later, know that it is located in Template:Filename. You can edit it by running the following command or by using your favorite text editor:
Template:Cli

GDM appearance

Slow Performance

Due to an improper coded GNOME drawing library, some actions in GNOME can slow the system. If the theme icons are in SVG format, they make the system slower. A very fast improvement is to either use icons in PNG format or to convert the used icons into the PNG format.

Default applications

You may want to configure system-wide default applications and file associations. This is extremely useful when you have some KDE applications installed, but still prefer a GNOME ones to be launched by default.

Enable Volume Control as tray notification

Some users will have noticed that there is no volume control by default. It either can be added as a object to the panel or as a notification icon in the systray. To do the last one you have to replace gnome-media with gnome-media-pulse. This will install the volume control manager developed by Redhat and used in Distributions such as Ubuntu or Fedora.

# pacman -S gnome-media-pulse

Fonts Seem Skewed

You can alter the DPI of your fonts in Gnome with right-click on the desktop → Change desktop background → Fonts → Details → Resolution

Enable smooth Fonts

To have a nice and readable font configuration all you have to do is to click again with right-click on the desktop → Fonts → Details.
Here you can set Subpixel (LCD) for Antialiasing and a low Hinting to have a optimal configuration. See Font Configuration for more information.

Change the Default Background Image

The default background is that zoomed in picture of a green leaf. It appears for newly created users, but more importantly, this is the image shown when the screen is locked. As of 25-Apr-2009, you can find this image here

Change the Default Background Color, Opacity, etc.

The default background color is green. You might want to change it if you're using a transparent PNG as background.

$ sudo gconf-editor

Go to File → New Defaults Window and edit the keys

/desktop/gnome/background/primary_color

and

/desktop/gnome/background/secondary_color

You can also find keys for opacity, shading style, etc.

Disable confirmation window when closing gnome-terminal

The terminal always prompts a confirmation window when trying to close the window while one is logged in as root. To avoid this confirmation start gconf-editor and disable confirmation_window_close variable in /apps/gnome-terminal/global. Please note that although this setting is not set via dconf-editor it also works in the Gnome Shell.

Misc Tips

Screen Lock

Make sure that dbus is running (probably a good idea to add it to the daemons array in rc.conf).

Now, create a directory called python-extensions in ~/.nautilus. Place the following script, named bsc.py, in this newly created folder. You may download the script here: [bsc.py] (please drop --stefanwilkens a line if this goes down)
Mirror: [bsc.py]

bas-v2.py adds fixes and more media support (link at bottom of 4th post).
Mirror: bsc-v2.py

Restart nautilus. You can now configure this new functionallity in Edit -> Preferences -> List Columns

Stop Nautilus drawing the desktop

You need to open the gconf-editor:

apps>nautilus>preferences untick "show_desktop"

In breezy you also need to go to:

desktop>gnome>background and untick "draw_background"

Thumbnails

You will need a tool for creating thumbnails, such as ffmpegthumbnailer. Make sure the necessary codecs are installed.

You can replace 'video@mpeg' in that line with any filetype that ffmpeg can open - just right-click > Properties on a file in Nautilus and look at the bit in brackets in the 'Type:' field (don't forget to replace the forward slash with an @ symbol). Some common filetypes are video@mpeg, video@x-matroska, video@x-ms-wmv, video@x-flv, video@x-msvideo, video@mp4; which are usually .mpg, .mkv, .wmv, .flv, .avi, .mp4 respectively.

Turn off Authentication needed to mount internal drive in Nautilus

In Ubuntu and other distros you are allowed to mount internal drives by clicking on them without the need for entering a password.
To get this behaviour in stock gnome, just create the following file in PolicyKit Local Authority:
Template:File

Speed Up Panel Autohide

panel_show_delay / panel_hide_delay

If you find that your panels are taking too long to appear/disappear when using the Panel Autohide feature, try this;

Start gconf-editor

Browse to /apps/panel/global

Set panel_hide_delay and panel_show_delay to more sensible (integer) values. Note that these values represent milliseconds!

The default panel_hide_delay of 500 works well in most cases, but the panel_show_delay default of 500 is horribly slow. After experimenting, a panel_show_delay between 100-200 seems much better.

Panel animation_speed

Now that the panel show/hide delay has the panels beginning to appear in a reasonable length of time, why does it take the panel so long to actually pop up? There is one more setting you need to add/change to make the panel behavior crisp. The setting: animation_speed This setting can be applied globally or on a per-panel basis just like the panel_show_delay and panel_hide_delay. The official description is:

The speed in which panel animations should occur. Possible values are slow, medium and fast. This key is only relevant if the enable_animations key is true.

To apply globally, just add or change the animation_speed key as a (string) value in:

/apps/panel/global

To apply the setting on a per-panel basis, just add/change the key in, for example:

/apps/panel/toplevels/bottom_panel_screen0/ (usually the default name for the bottom panel)

/apps/panel/toplevels/panel_0/ (usually the default name for the first additional panel)

GNOME Menu Tips

Speed Tweak

However, this setting is reported to crash banshee, and possibly other programs.

Menu Editing

Most Gnome users complain about the menu. Changing menu entries system-wide or for one or several users alone is poorly documented.

User menus

Older versions of Gnome (i.e. 2.22 or earlier) have a menu editor in which you can de-select menu entires, but not add new menu entries. Right-click on the menu panel and select Edit Menus. Unchecking the box next to a entry will prevent it from displaying.

To add new menu entries, create a .desktop file in the $XDG_DATA_HOME/applications directory (most likely $HOME/.local/share). A sample .desktop file can be seen below, or take a look at the Gnome documentation.

Or install Alacarte, which makes it easy to create, change and remove menu entries with a GUI. Do this with:

# pacman -S alacarte

Group menus, System menus

You will find common gnome menu entries as 'appname.desktop' objects inside one of the $XDG_DATA_DIRS/applications directories (most likely /usr/share/applications). To add new menu items for all users, create an 'appname.desktop' file in one of those directories.

Edit one of them to fit your needs for a new application, then save it.

Save it as a menu entry for all users Most often, you will set this files permissions to 644 (root: rw group: r others: r), so all users can see it.

Save it as a menu entry for a group or user alone You may also have different user permissions; for example, some menu entries should only be available for a group or for one user.

Alternatively get the artwork package using "pacman -S archlinux-artwork", this puts all artwork in the /usr/share/archlinux directory, and resize your desired logo to 24x24px and copy it into that directory as 'start-here.png'

Restart your gnome-panels and the new Arch logo should be displayed

$ pkill gnome-panel

Note: To get this to work (gnome 2.28) I had to delete the icon-theme.cache file in /usr/share/icons/gnome

Custom Icon using gconf-editor

Open the configuration editor in gnome (it should be in System Tools of your main menu) or run gconf-editor

In the configuration editor go to apps > panel > objects > find the object for your menu (an easy way to spot the correct object is that it will have "Main Menu" in the tool tip section).

Set the path to your icon in the "Custom_Icon" field.

Check "Use_Custom_Icon" a little ways down.

The panel should reload momemtarily, if not, open a terminal window and type:

$ killall gnome-panel

Removing default icons from desktop

I like to keep my desktop clean, and perhaps someone else too. So here is how to remove home folder, computer and trash from desktop:

Disabling scroll in taskbar

For years there is "bug" in Gnome taskbar: the mouse scroll switches the windows. The annoying feature if you have a good mice turns to be a real pain if you have the touchpad. It is impossible to scroll precisely using touchpad, so if you accidentally touch it when your mouse is on the taskbar, then all the windows will flash/switch wildly. There is no setting in gconf/preferences, that can disable this functionality. This is true for KDE 3, I do not know if problem persist in KDE 4. The solution was to install xfce4-panel, which hasn't scrolling at all and looks like default gnome panel. The bug is better described here [1].

This bug will be probably never fixed, but we have ABS, so we can build custom software. Install ABS (+70Mb), then

cp -r /var/abs/extra/libwnck /home/{your name}/Desktop/somewhere

Navigate to that dir, then

makepkg --nobuild

This will download and extract the sources. Go to src/libwnck-{version}/libwnck. Edit tasklist.c, search for "scroll-event". You will see somethign like

This line enables scroll-event handler, comment the line out (place /* before and */ after the line). Now go back to /home/{username}/Desktop/somewhere and

makepkg --noextract --syncdeps

You will need sudo to be able to install missing dependencies (intltool), but you can always 'pacman -S' them apart if you do not want --syncdeps automatically. The --noextract option tells makepkg to not extract sources and use existing src/

pacman -U libwnck-{version}.pkg.tar.gz

Then logout/login, enjoy. Delete dir with the sources from you desktop, you may also uninstall abs if you want. Next step will be to add gconf option, but I will leave this for Gnome gurus. I just do not need this "feature", not even if I use the mouse (alt+tab is better anyway).

Custom transitioning background

This will create a transitioning background similiar to the "cosmos" background found in the gnome-backgrounds package. There are three ways to do this.

Note: The image filenames must not have spaces in them.

Manual

You can create an XML file similiar to the one created by gnome-backgrounds in "/usr/share/backgrounds/cosmos/".

Note that the <duration> tag sets each image as the background for 1795 seconds, or 29 minutes and 55 seconds, and the <transition> then takes 5 seconds. You can add any number of images as long as the last one transitions back to the first (if you want a full loop). Once completed, the XML file can be added to GNOME under System > Preferences > Appearance > Background tab > Add.

Copy the code for the script above into a file called mkwlppr (short for "make wallpaper"). Make the script executable by typing:

sudo chmod 711 mkwlppr

Move the file so that you can run it from any directory by just using its name:

sudo mv mkwlppr /bin

Execute the script; it will tell you what input it requires from you. Use the script with input to create as many wallpaper XML files as you want.

Notes:
Since this script is not interactive, you can use Unix's wildcards with it if you want to use all files in a directory and/or if you do not care about the order of the images.
You can specify paths relative to your current directory, and the script will put the files' absolute paths into the XML file for you; so you can create the XML file anywhere you want and move it afterward without rendering it useless.
If you want to run the script inside the /usr/share/backgrounds/ directory, you might have problems with permissions unless you run the command with sudo like this:
sudo mkwlppr -parameters
If you do not know what duration to specify for the images, simply do not provide a number in the input, and the progam will use the default values of 29 minutes and 55 seconds per image and a 5 second transition.
For more information, please see this page.

GUI

If you prefer using a GUI, you can install CreBS from the AUR, which is a PyGTK app for creating background slideshows for GNOME.

Change default size of gnome-terminal

Method 1

The terminal emulator gnome-terminal does neither allow the set a default size nor does remember the last size. In order to set the default size consider the following steps:

Change the following line in Template:Filename accordingly:Template:CodelineHere 80 stands for the number of columns (i.e. width in characters) and 24 for the number of lines (i.e. height in characters).

Terminate all gnome-terminal processes to let the changes take effect.

Method 2

Another option is to simply use the --geometry switch when starting gnome-terminal (can be done via a right-click/properties on the launcher, then enter the following in the "Command" field: gnome-terminal --geometry 105x25+100+20).

Note: You can save your wallpaper to a static path like /home/user/wall.jpg and configure gdm, gnome-desktop and gnome-screensaver to point at it. This way you can have the same wallpaper on each of them.

Toolbar style in GTK applications

The default setting in GNOME 2.30 displays text next to icons in the toolbar of GTK applications. This means labels will only appear near buttons that the developer marks as "important". To have labels always show under the buttons in the toolbar:

both-horiz (default, text is only displayed next to "important" buttons)

text (only labels on buttons, no icons)

icons (only icons on buttons, no labels)

Missing icons in System Menu

The default setting under 2.30 does not display the usual icons under the System menu. In the 2.28 version, they could be enabled from System >> Preferences >> Appearance >> Interface. This case is not possible anymore. Now this can be enabled from: